Hip Hop Aesthetics and the Will to Culture1

In this paper, based upon my field work with the self-styled ‘Hip Hop Community’ in Sydney, in the early 1990s, I examine the material processes by which ‘cultural’ significance is articulated to a number of key practices, specifically, break-dancing, rapping and graffiti. I argue that these practices are understood, within the scene, as being aesthetic practices, which operate to mimetically ‘represent’ a pre-existing cultural essence—Hip Hop. Using a Peircian semiotic model, I argue that the maintenance of performances of these key Hip Hop practices functions over time, within the Hip Hop community, to affirm the legitimacy, authenticity and reality of the idea of Hip Hop.